Although Memorial Day is now associated with travel, barbecues, and sales, it originally had a more reverent purpose.
From AP News. Memorial Day is supposed to be about mourning the nation’s fallen service members, but it’s come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on anything from mattresses to lawn mowers.
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Auto club AAA said in a travel forecast that this holiday weekend could be “one for the record books, especially at airports,” with more than 42 million Americans projected to travel 50 miles (80 kilometers) or more. …
But for Manuel Castañeda Jr., 58, the day will be a quiet one in Durand, Illinois, outside Rockford. He lost his father, a U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam, in an accident in California while training other Marines in 1966.
“Memorial Day is very personal,” said Castañeda, who also served in the Marines and Army National Guard, from which he knew men who died in combat. …
WHAT IS THE OFFICIAL PURPOSE OF MEMORIAL DAY?
It’s a day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the U.S. military, according to the Congressional Research Service. The holiday is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. for a moment of silence.
WHAT ARE THE HOLIDAY’S ORIGINS?
The holiday stems from the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members — both Union and Confederate — between 1861 and 1865.
There’s little controversy over the first national observance of what was then called Decoration Day. It occurred May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom. …
HAS MEMORIAL DAY ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE OF CONTENTION?
Someone has always lamented the holiday’s drift from its original meaning.
As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focuses more on pomp, dinners and oratory.
In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War’s impetus — slavery — when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. …
Meanwhile, how the day was spent — at least by the nation’s elected officials — could draw scrutiny for years after the Civil War. In the 1880s, then-President Grover Cleveland was said to have gone fishing — and “people were appalled,” said Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon. …
HOW HAS MEMORIAL DAY CHANGED?
Dennis said Memorial Day’s potency diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked World War I’s end on Nov. 11, 1918. Armistice Day became a national holiday by 1938 and was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.
An act of Congress changed Memorial Day from every May 30th to the last Monday in May in 1971. Veterans objected: “They didn’t want to be just some random Monday that people could forget about,” Dennis said.
In 1972, Time Magazine said the holiday had become “a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.” …
Meanwhile, Jason Redman, 48, a retired Navy SEAL who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he’ll be thinking of friends he’s lost. Thirty names are tattooed on his arm “for every guy that I personally knew that died.”
He wants Americans to remember the fallen — but also to enjoy themselves, knowing lives were sacrificed to forge the holiday.
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(Excerpt from AP News. Photo Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)